London: Lawyers for an Oxford graduate who is suing the university over his “disappointing” exam grades nearly two decades ago told a London court Tuesday that he missed out on going to law school in the US because of his results.

Faiz Siddiqui, who received a 2:1 degree, the second-highest grade available, says in a submission to the court that he received poor teaching for one of his papers.

“While a 2:1 degree from Oxford might rightly seem like a tremendous achievement to most, it fell significantly short of Mr. Siddiqui’s expectations and was, to him, a huge disappointment,” his lawyers said in court filings.

His lower-than-expected grades — 17 years ago — exacerbated his depression and this left him “unable to achieve the professional career he had hoped for,” including missing out on the chance to study at an Ivy League university after Oxford, his papers say.

His lawyer Roger Mallalieu told the court on the first day of a seven-day trial Tuesday that there was “simply inadequate teaching” for one of Siddiqui’s papers. But the university’s lawyer Julian Milford said Siddiqui was being taught by an expert in the field with 30 years’ experience in the subject: The Indigenous Politics and Imperial Control of India between 1916 and 1934.

Many UK graduate recruitment programs require at least a 2:1, rather than a first-class degree. But graduates with first-class degrees are more likely than those with a 2:1 to work in high-wage industries — and they earn starting salaries that are about 3% higher, according to research published by the London School of Economics in 2013.

The university’s lawyers say his grade was an “excellent platform for success in future life.” They say emails indicate his undergraduate scores didn’t affect his applications to Harvard and Yale law schools and there are many possible reasons, including his serious hay fever, for his worse-than-expected score on the exam.

A spokeswoman for the university, and lawyers for Siddiqui, declined to immediately comment on Tuesday.

After graduating from Oxford Siddiqui trained at the UK “magic circle” law firm Clifford Chance but wasn’t kept on at the end of his training, according to his court filings. He worked for three other law firms and then as a tax adviser at the accounting firm EY, but was dismissed in December 2011 “essentially for poor performance.” He has been unemployed since.

“In his depressed state and suffering from insomnia he was unable to perform as he — and his employers — would have liked,” his papers say. “At the root of all this lay his profound disappointment with and inability to understand his poor results at Oxford.”

The case. which was originally filed in 2014, is Faiz Siddiqui v. University of Oxford, High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Case No. HQ14X03469. Bloomberg